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vine mission , and to the importance and authority of what he delivered as the great teacher sent from God , and spreads a superior lustre over his character and example .
Foreseeing that , if I should be able to prosecute my plan to its full extent , I shall have much more to compose and write than I have yet by me in any form ; I feel a wish to enlarge this letter , if you , Sir , have no objection , on your own account , or that of your readers , to insert so much on a single subject in one number of your Repository . Cheerfully leaving it with you to determine whether my present communication .
so far as the end of the preceding paragraph , or the whole of what shall be written on this paper , shall next appear in your miscel - lany , I take the liberty of adding what follows , for the purpose of
showing what method I mean to pursue in delivering my own ideas relating to the subject of the temptation . And my object is , by the help of positions , founded on data deducible , as it appears to me , from the gospel history , to show
I . That our Lord himself was probably the jfirst , who reported what had befallen him in the desert . II . That the account
transmitted to us by the three first evangelists is probably , in every thing material , the same with what came originally from him .
Here follow the positions , which seem to me sufficient to establish these two points : 1 . That ^ Jesus was impelled bv the § pjrit tp retire from the banks of the Jordan ,
* nto the inner and more dreary part of the wilderness . —^ 2 . That a * he did not enter upon his public
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ministry ^ or make any disciples before his temptation was ended ;
and as we have no intimation , that any one accompanied or fol * lowed him into his retirement , we may fairly presume , that there was no human witness of what befel
him during his stay in the desert . —3 . That , if he remained forty days secluded from all human society , the first account of what happened to him during that interval , must have been communicated by himself , or by divine revelation . —4 . That the former
being the more natural and likely origin of the history of his temptation , and obviously superseding the need of the latter , was probably the true one . —6 . That without strong evidence of the fact , ( and I do not know that we have evidence
or any sort or degree for it ) we ean have no right to suppose , that the disciple or disciples , who received immediately from our Lord himself his own account of the
temptation , felt so little respect for him , as to venture upon altering or modifying that account in any way , in order to render it conformable ( if it were not so before ) to his or their preconceived
opinions . —6 . That the evangelical statements , d ^ awn up most pro bably from the representation primarily given by our Lord himself , of the scenes through which he passed in the wilderness , wear every mark
of plain , artless and ungarbled narratives , —7- That if those statements , as they now stand in the three first gospels , afford us a correct view of our Lord ' s own repre * sentation of such of his trials in
the desert as are particularly recorded , we are furnished with means of discovering what were his own ideas of the cause and na-
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Ori the Temptation of Christ . — -Letter 3 . 449
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v ot . v . 3 m
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1810, page 449, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2408/page/25/
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